INVENTED IN HUNGARY

Innovation is the golden thread that runs right through the 2023-24 edition of “Invented in Hungary.” There is innovation in manufacturing, exemplified by the iFactory BMW is creating at Debrecen, the first of its kind to be purpose-built by the Bavarian-based automaker to maximize digitization and minimize carbon emissions from the initial designs onward. The innovations here will be introduced wherever possible in BMW’s existing factories. There is innovation in travel, whether it is new scanning technologies at Budapest Airport that aim to increase security and speed up passenger processing time, new approaches to urban travel, as pioneered by the Future Mobility Alliance, or the remote driving technologies brought to life by university spin-off DriveByCloud Kft. that enable you to drive a vehicle around the ZalaZone test track in Hungary while sat behind the wheel of a booth in Munich, or even Los Angeles. There is innovation galore in the Hungarian healthcare and wellness sector, from the relatively humble life-enhancing concentration of the country’s healing waters bringing spa benefits to a bathtub near you, to the life-saving pharmaceutical developments of MSD (for whom Hungary is the “sweet spot” for clinical trials) and the cutting-edge research of the Szeged-headquartered Hungarian Center of Excellence for Molecular Medicine, which aims to unearth new means of tackling age-related diseases. Finally, there is innovation in thinking, whether it is the 24-hour hackathon arranged by Bosch and CraftHub that asks high schoolers, university students and early careerists to dream up hardware and software developments that address real-world problems or the approach taken by the Association of Innovative Pharmaceutical Manufacturers in launching an academy to help provide training, mentoring and professional management development to Hungarian patient organizations. We hope you find the stories we have highlighted inspiring and illuminating.